


A Ranger and a Gunslinger

by dimircharmer



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe- Class Swap, F/M, I don't know why I bothered but all the spells feats and alternate deals here can be done in the PHB, Percy has a crow as his beast companion because he's nothing if not dedicated to the #aesthetic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 05:52:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8359729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer
Summary: Vex'ahlia, gunslinger and tinkerer extraordinaire, and her relationship with Percival, the ranger.aka, a class swap AU.





	

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Beebalee's outfit swap over here that got me thinking about this big dumb AU in the first place: http://beebalee.tumblr.com/post/149292858197/this-started-with-me-wanting-to-draw-vex-wearing

In this world, when the twins get back to Byroden, and find it a soldering ruin, something hardens in Vex. There was nothing these people could have done. No weapon that could Take Down a dragon, in the hands of guardsmen.

Something whispers in the back of her head, _no weapon that exists yet._

 _“_ Brother,” She says, ash of the only home they’ve ever known heaped in piles around them, “If I wanted to learn to smith-?”

“Anything,” Vax says, “Anywhere but here.”

And they set out for Emon the next day. When they arrive, Vex spends three days knocking on the doors of every smith, weapons master and jeweller in the city before she finds a maker of nick knacks and simple jewellery in need of an apprentice.

“We don’t make nothing fancy here,”Says the old woman at the front of the shop, “But we’d be willing to take you in for a pair of extra hands, if you're not looking to make anything more than trinkets.”

Vex grins, and bares all her teeth. “That sounds wonderful,” she says.

-

Percy, when he fled from his home, didn’t dare to so much as tread a foot in cities again for years. In this world instead of being fascinated with his workshop, Percy had spent his idle hours riding and hunting, and when Cassandra sets him free, it is this knowledge that keeps him from the Briarwood’s hounds and trackers.

He ekes out a subsistence living with a stolen bow, a musty and poorly tanned leather cloak and a head full of memories that will not let him sleep. On a night Percy will only realise later was Wintercrest, Percy dreams of a creature he can never quite see, promising a feral joy, of spilled blood and the power to make his quarry quiver before him.

Percy can only say “they killed my family.”

The creature smiles at him, and extends its neck impossibly far, bringing her face right up to Percy’s.

“Would you like the power to hunt them down like the beasts they are, to make them fear the predator you will become?”

“Yes,” Percy breathes, and feels wild, old, feral magic wrap itself into his bones.

He wakes the next morning to the cry of birds, and finds a crow perched by the remains of his fire, nursing a broken wing. For reasons he doesn’t quite understand, he begins training it as his companion. He calls her Bad News.

-

It takes her three years, working constantly, sketching and prototyping, before Vex has a working model. It’s a beautiful thing, this invention that she’s created, all curved lines and streamlined power. Vax has worried about her, she knows, dropping by the shop whenever he has a spare moment, pressing stolen coin and materials into her palm, dragging her away from the forge once a week to get a real meal and to sleep in a bed curled around each other like children. But this is worth it. Everything about this has been worth it.

She has scrapped and restarted this project no less than five times. The last one, she got it to the point she took it for a test fire, and it blew up in her hands, nearly taking one of her fingers with it. This one, though she has a good feeling about.

She finds her brother and they travel together to the outskirts of the city, and he sets up a target on a tree nearby, and then retreats behind her back.

“Alright, sister,” he says “let’s see what this pet project of yours can do.”

Vex extends her arm, and her first shot blasts such a hole through the target that it’s rendered useless. Her second knocks a single pine cone off it’s limb, lead buried somewhere in it’s centre. Her third shatters an entire tree limb, bringing it crashing to the forest floor, cratering in the snow. The noise of her shots has scared the local wildlife, and she spends her fourth, fifth and six shots shooting birds on the wing as they panic, one-two-three in quick succession. The three little bodies hit the ground before the echo of the shots fades from the woods.

“Gods above,” Vax breathes, his air misting in the cold, “What in the hells have you made, sister.”

Vex blows the smoke from the barrel of her gun, and looks at the first thing it ever killed- a the remains of a blue jay, hot blood steaming in the snow.

“They told me all I’d ever make was trinkets,” Vex says, and spins her gun around one finger before tucking it back in her holster. “So this will just be a Trinket among many.”

-

Percy spends the next year doing what he does best- tracking. Ripley, he thinks, should be the first to go. Bad News circles Stilben for days, scouting ahead as Percy sets up in a tree and waits, waits for the chance to take the perfect shot.

He never even sees her face.

-

Vex is exploring the dungeons beneath ruin exploration team’s main camp, trinket ready in her hand, when she hears a quite unexpected in her current situation- the cry of a crow. A quick glance around reveals the creature tied to a perch on the warden’s desk.

“Well hello darling,” Vex says, and reaches to untie it, “What are you doing here?”

The crow caws at her again, and the moment she has it free, it scoops up the ring of keys on the desk in it’s beak and takes off down the dark hallway.

It disappears into the gloom, and Vex hears a quite human voice say “Oh, thank you, clever girl,” from a cell in the dark.

There is the distinct clink-click of a key in a lock. Vex cautiously cocks Trinket, and calls out, “Who’s there?”

Emerging from the gloom, hands in the air, crow perched on his quiver, is a man with shock white hair and a pair of gold rimmed glasses.

“Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III, formerly of Whitestone, at your service,” He bows slightly, “I believe I have you to thank for freeing my bird. May I have your name?”

“Vex’ahlia,” she says, “Currently of a group of ne’er do wells called the Super High Intensity Team. Why were you in that cell?”

Percival extends his hands, palm up. “Attempted murder.” His crow caws in agreement.

Vex raises an eyebrow at the man’s dedication to bird puns in the face of a weapon, and holsters Trinket. “Well if that’s all then, I think I have some people you’d be interested to meet.”

-

Travelling with the team that broke him out of prison isn’t a path that Percy expected, but he certainly can’t find it within himself to complain. He finds that he even _likes_ these people- foul mouthed and dirty and foolish though they are. For the first time in what felt like years, the urging pang, the nearly Feral Instinct that had him track Ripley halfway across the continent of Tal’Dorei faded to the back of his mind- a hunger abated but not quenched.

The thought always itched- he always longed to see their blood spill across the floor, to see their corpses riddled with arrows, but it was no longer the only thought in his head. He was a person again, thought and creativity and humour, no longer simply a bundle of instincts and a blood fury that made Grog’s pale in comparison. He could joke and flirt and speak once more; his voice was rusty with disuse, but for the first time in many years he had occasion to use it regularly.

He would never tell this group of friends this, but this, more than anything else, he was indebted to them for.

-

Vex finds that Percy and herself often find themselves pressed Side to Side in snipers nests, comparing range and shots and sheer power, and occasionally even simply talking. He seems unsettled by Trinket.

“Have you thought about what that thing will mean for the rest of the world?” he asks

“Of course darling,” She turns Trinket over in her hands, running her thumbs over the ivory inlay, “Whyever do you think I don’t let anyone else touch it?”

“Do you think that will be enough?”

“Well my brother has express orders to destroy it when I die,” she says, “Not that I will, of course, but one hardly makes something like this without thinking about the consequences.”

Percy peers at her for a moment, and she reaches up to readjust the bright blue feathers behind her ear out of discomfort.

“I do believe you have,” Percy says eventually, “Good. I would hate to think that someone capable of building something like that was an idiot. Or worse, a good person.”

It startles a laugh out of her, “Excuse me?”

“Not that you’re a bad person,” he assures her, “But that if Keyleth or Pike invented something like that, they would think nothing of handing one out to every farmer and field hand in need of self defence we met crossing the countryside. They’d be part of every army within the decade.” He shifts in his crouch, pulling his cloak more firmly against his front. “You, however, expect the worst in people. It’s one of my favourite things about you, you know.”

“Should I be flattered or insulted?”

“Well, I’d certainly be flattered,” Percy said, and extends a hand for Bad News to land on, circling back from a recognisance mission. “But I already knew I wasn’t a good person.”

“Percy,” She frowns at him, as he lovingly feeds a scrap of jerky to his crow, “You’re not a bad person.”

“Would you believe me if I told you the same thing?”

“No.”

“Well then. There you have it.”

-

“ _SYLAS,”_ Percy yells, practically howls across the courtyard, and he draws his bow. He can feel something rippling at his feet, sparking and growing, but there is no _time_ , Vax is unconscious at the Briarwood’s feet, and he is so close he can almost taste their blood on his tongue-

He remembers very little, ultimately, about the rest of that night.

-

This is what Vex remembers about that night: The terrifying certainty that the only remaining member of her family to which she had any claim was dead. Of shooting straighter than she ever had in her life, of knocking spells off course with shots aimed at hands, and of her brother’s lifeblood spilling rich into the grass on the grounds of the palace.

She also remembers Percy.

Percy, who for the first time since hearing the Briarwood’s names looked terrifying, rather than terrified. She remembers his bared teeth as he unleashed arrow after arrow after them, remembers the way his canines seemed to grow, the brambles that crept to life near his feet, the terrible otherworldly, glowing nature of his arrows that night, something she had never seen before. His hands nearly talons on his bow, his hair rippling with a breeze that wasn’t there, a glamour flickering in and out over his skin. She remembers looking at Percy, and for the first time, being truly afraid.

-

It becomes real for Percy for the first time when they kill Stonefell. Percy himself slits the man’s throat, wants to get close enough to smell him die. When he does, there’s a terrible shift in his jaw, in the bones of his face,and he’s aware, vaugly, that plant life is erupting from the ground around Stonefell’s corpse, pulling him into the wood of the floor.

He wished, in that moment, that he had a mask to hide behind, that he wasn’t sparking wild magic from his fingers and behind his eyes, that he could speak with out his teeth showing them all the evidence of the deal he had made.

“Percival, darling,” Vex says, and grasps his hand, “Come back to us.”

And with a terrible shift of bone and effort, with revenge still howling in the back of his head, he does.

-

In the catacombs beneath his ancestral home, a parasite that Percy has been carrying for years is purged from his body, a terrible antlered beast, a servant of the Grand Master of the Hunt in the fey wild. When it is dead, and Delilah dead by his sister’s hand, and her body falling apart in acid, Scanlan turns to him.

“Percy, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Of course we are.”

“Let me see your bird for a moment?”

Bad News squawks in panic and thrashes, but Grog has her by her tail feathers, and her talons are useless against Goliath skin.

“Wait,” Percy says, “What-”

and then Pike blasts a Greater Restoration straight through the form of his familiar, and Percy feels the last knot of Woden’s presence loosen and disappear from his chest.

“Oh,” he says, and sinks against the wall. Pike releases his struggling crow, and it alights on his knee. “I’m sorry, old friend.” he tells his bird.

Bad News looks at him betrayed, caws, and pecks at his hand.

-

Vex’s new gun scares her, to be perfectly honest. It’s huge, powerful, heavy, and it kicks like a mule. Percy has been keeping her company in the workshop beneath Whitestone for the past few weeks, on and off, as they get the castle back up to working order again. She had been self conscious, in the beginning, about her unflattering smithing clothes, and her hair pinned tight to her skull, and the fact that inevitably she emerged from the workshop dripping in sweat and soot, but Percy proved a remarkably insightful work companion.

He was there when she tested out the new gun, this one two handed, a better sniper weapon than a close-quarters one, single barrel causing a cracking echo that bounced off two separate cliffs before drifting to silence.

The target had been pinned to a hay bale, and the hay bale now has a hole the size of a dinner plate punched through it.

“Well,” Vex says, slinging the gun over her shoulder, “Would that put a dent in dragon hide, do you think?”

Percy puts his glasses on to examine the smouldering edges of the bullet hole.

“I think it just might, at that. What are you going to call this one.”

“Eros,” Vex said, “To conquer all, and never miss a heart.”

Percy peers up at her, and smiles in the late winter sun. “Not to mention to shame any fool who underestimated the reputation of a woman wielding nothing but the power of love and a single trinket.”

“Well,” Vex says, and can’t help the smile that creeps across her face in return

“I can’t imagine who would dare,” he says, and takes her hand,

“A fool,” she says, tilting her face to his, “Or perhaps an optimist- someone who expects everyone else to be good people.”

“Lucky for us,” he murmured, close enough she could feel his breath on her face, “Neither of us are either of those,” and he closes the distance.

**Author's Note:**

> I kept Percy's one level in warlock, because he never doesn't make bad choices when he thinks the deal is worth it and thinks he's smarter than the person he's bargaining with, but I swapped out the Fiend pact for the Archfey pact, for flavour reasons. It would probably make for a verrrrry interesting epilogue in the feywild, which I might write someday, but not today.


End file.
